SERENDIPITOUS FRIDAYS: BOOK BEGINNINGS & THE FRIDAY 56 — DEC. 14

Welcome to some bookish fun today as we share Book Beginnings, hosted by Rose City Reader; and as we showcase The Friday 56 with Freda’s Voice.

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

If you have been wanting to participate, but haven’t yet tried, now is the time!

What better way to spend a Friday?

 

Today, I’ve grabbed a book from next week’s pile.  Chanel Bonfire, by Wendy Lawless, is an ARC from the Amazon Vine program.

Beginning:  Perhaps because her second marriage had only lasted twenty months, or perhaps because she was having a bad hair day, in January of 1969 my mother swallowed a whole bottle of pills and called my stepfather at his hotel to say good-bye.

Pretty, dramatic.  I can’t wait to read more!

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56:  My sister and I stared dumbly at her.  This morning we’d left our home to go to school, and at the end of the day we had a new one.  Maudie was wailing from her carrier on the front seat next to the driver.  I understood exactly how she felt.

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Amazon Description:  WITH CLEAR-EYED GRACE, REFRESHING HONESTY, AND FLASHING WIT, WENDY LAWLESS TELLS THE TRUE STORY OF HER UNHINGED UPBRINGING— A DISJOINTED FAIRY TALE OF A CHILDHOOD IN CHAOS

By the time Wendy Lawless turned seventeen, she’d known for quite some time that she didn’t have a normal mother. But that didn’t stop her from wanting one. . . .

GEORGANN REA didn’t bake cookies or go to PTA meetings; she wore a mink coat and always had a lit Dunhill plugged into her cigarette holder. She went through men like Kleenex, and didn’t like dogs or children. Georgann had the ice queen beauty of a Hitchcock heroine and the cold heart to match.

In “a searing memoir that reads like a novel” (Anne Korkeakivi, An Unexpected Guest), Wendy Lawless deftly charts the highs and lows of growing up with her younger sister in the shadow of an unstable, fabulously neglectful mother. Georgann, a real-life Holly Golightly who constantly reinvents herself as she trades up from trailer park to penthouse, suffers multiple nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts, while Wendy tries to hide the cracks in their fractured family from the rest of the world.

Chanel Bonfire depicts a childhood blazed through the refined aeries of the Dakota and the swinging town houses of London, while the girls’ beautiful but damned mother desperately searches for glamour and fulfillment. Ultimately, Wendy and her sister must choose between living their own lives and being their mother’s warden—the hardest, most painful, yet most important decision each of them will ever make.

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Now I’m eager to check out the rest of your offerings….